editor's choice
Introducing Veritas Virtual Infrastructure from Symantec: Block-based Virtualization Built on Enterprise Storage Management for Your Enterprise Infrastructure
Companies can't risk losing the visibility and control they get from existing block-based storage management techniques when they virtualize high-end application servers. But that's exactly what happens to organizations using VMware's file-based storage management approach. Discover how Veritas Virtual Infrastructure from Symantec preserves the settings found in companies' current physical environments in their virtual infrastructures—and the centralized storage management capabilities which ent erprises require. Read the white paper »
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The Lowdown
Enhancing Operations Efficiency: Symantec Delivers Veritas Operations Services
In complex IT infrastructures — defined by service oriented architectures (SOA) and composite applications that are supported by layers of virtualized storage and server infrastruc-
ture — the ability to manage adds, changes and moves in the data center is challenging. Learn why Enterprise Strategy Group says Symantec's new, free services improve operational activities around the installation and maintenance of Symantec software. Read now » -
The Impact of Virtualization on the IT Infrastructure
It is imperative to look beyond physical servers to consider the impact virtualization will have on the entire IT infrastructure, including backup and storage. In this article from Virtual Strategy Magazine, find out how IT organizations can ensure that they continue to have the same level of data protection, recovery, visibility, and storage across their entire IT infra-
structure, regardless of its physical or virtual composition. Read now » -
Green Virtualization - Controlling Power and Cooling Costs in the Data Center
About 60 billion kilowatt-hours were consumed by data centers in 2006, and a growing appetite for IT services and more powerful chips is accelerating consumption at a rapid pace. Virtualization is the number one approach to saving power for many organizations, and efforts such as data de-duplication help curb power consumption and costs by enabling better utilization of storage hardware. Read now »
Recommended Reading
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Veritas NetBackup VMware 3.x: Best Practices
How best to protect the data on your virtual machines? Hear about the pros and cons of various backup configuration choices for your VMware virtual infrastructure. Read now »
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Data Protection and Application Availability for Your VMware Environment with Veritas NetBackup and Cluster Server for VMware ESX
Server virtualization delivers many advantages, from increasing infrastructure flexibility to reducing facilities costs and requirements. It also brings with it challenges in the form of application and data availability. In this presentation, you can explore how VCS for VMware and NetBackup for VMware addresses those challenges. Read now »
In Depth Resources
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Protecting Business-Critical Applications in a VMware Infrastructure 3 Environment Using Veritas Cluster Server for VMware ESX
As companies move from a one-application/one-server architecture to a highly consolidated virtual server environment, high availability and disaster recovery become even more important. That increases the need for businesses to invest in robust and proven solutions for providing local high availability as well as automated wide-area failover. Discover how Veritas Cluster Server for VMware ESX brings protection against both physical server failures and outages affecting virtual machines. Read now »
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Storage Management Considerations in Virtual Environments
In this webinar you'll get sound advice about how to save money and conserve resources by more effectively utilizing the storage assets you have, and making better decisions about your storage environment going forward. Doing so has never been more important, particularly as virtualization redefines IT infrastructure environments and further accelerates storage growth. Read now »
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Data Protection and Virtual Environments
In just a couple of years, more than half the servers that will be deployed will be deployed as virtual servers. Protecting these virtual environments requires a new level of thinking. In this podcast, you can hear more about what you need to consider when it comes to protecting data in virtual environments. Read now »
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VCS For VMware
Companies should expect to use a single set of tools for their high availability and disaster recovery requirements across heterogeneous physical and virtual server environments. Learn more about why—and how—in this podcast. Read now »
About the Sponsor | Symantec
Symantec is a global leader in providing security, storage and systems management solutions to help consumers and organizations secure and manage their information-driven world. Our software and services protect against more risks at more points, more completely and efficiently, enabling confidence wherever information is used or stored.
Related News
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State of the Data Center: Overworked and Underfunded
— January 13, 2009 | Wall Street & Technology -
Practical Disaster Recovery for Midsize Companies
— December 20, 2008 | InformationWeek -
Master Virtualization and You Master the Cloud
— December 15, 2008 | InformationWeek's Plug Into the Cloud -
Green IT Beyond Virtualization: Storage Matters
— November 8, 2008 | InformationWeek -
Symantec Opens Up Its Services to Enterprise Apps
— October 15, 2008 | InformationWeek
Ask the Expert
Q.
How can deploying data de-duplication across virtualized data center environments reduce total storage consumption and network bandwidth requirements for daily backups?
A.
One of the most talked about recovery benefits with virtual servers is the ability to quickly recover a complete server image to different hardware, but this convenience comes at the cost of storing multiple copies of operating systems, applications, and data. As a result, many customers see their backup storage costs balloon with increased use of virtual servers. Data deduplication, which is the process of eliminating duplicate backup data at a sub-file level, can help to solve the storage problem and more, says Peter Elliman, senior manager in Symantec's Data Protection Group.
Whether you need granular file level recovery, or the ability to roll-back to a full virtual server image (for example, one used for testing and development), you'll find benefits from data deduplication. Deduplication can be deployed like a traditional backup client, referred to as source-side deduplication, or just before data is written to disk, referred to as target-side deduplication. Finally, this technology delivers another powerful benefit Ð the ability to efficiently replicate backup data.
Source-side data de-duplication clients, or agents, work at a sub-file level and move only changed blocks of data. They deliver a high degree of bandwidth and CPU efficiency to the backup and recovery process. Because source-side de-duplication moves only changed data, it moves less data from the server across the network to storage. That translates into using 99 percent less bandwidth on average as well as less aggregate storage.
With target-side de-duplication, companies essentially change their backup storage target from standard disk to dedupe disk and can reduce aggregate storage consumption by 10 to 50 times. Customers can use agents or image-based backups (agent-less) of virtual servers with dedupe disk and store less data. The agent-less approach works well for image based recovery, but can be surprisingly problematic when you need to recover just a few files because the time it takes to mount a large virtual server image and find the files may far exceed recovery requirements. Finally, application and database consistent recovery can be problematic or impossible with an agent-less approach to virtual server protection. Always check with your application or database provider regarding recommended backup and recovery methods for virtual environments.
Symantec is unique among backup vendors with its support for both source and target-side data de-duplication and for image-backup with granular recovery of virtual servers. As customers deploy virtual servers, they should consider how their backup application can leverage both deduplication and virtual server recovery technologies to serve their needs both today and in the future.